You may have heard that a young man named Abner Doubleday invented the game known as baseball in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 1839. Doubleday then went on to become a Civil War hero, while baseball became America’s beloved national pastime. Not only is that story untrue, it’s not even in the ballpark. Doubleday was still at West Point in 1839, and he never claimed to have anything to do with baseball. In 1907, a special commission created by the sporting goods magnate and former major league player A.J. Spalding used flimsy evidence—namely the claims of one man, mining engineer Abner Graves—to come up with the Doubleday origin story. Cooperstown businessmen and major league officials would rely on the myth’s enduring power in the 1930s, when they established the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in the village.
